Amanda Knox concedes being 'tone-deaf' in days after roommate's murder

By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN

Updated 5:07 PM ET, Tue May 7, 2013

The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Amanda Knox at her parents' home in Seattle, Washington, on March 27, 2015. Knox and Raffaele Sollecito (not pictured) were acquitted by Italy's highest court in the murder of British student Meredith Kercher.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Amanda Knox appears on NBC's "Today" show. Knox spent four years in jail because of murder charges in the death of her roommate Meredith Kercher while studying abroad in Perugia, Italy.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Appeals Court Judge Alessandro Nencini, center, reads the verdict in the death of British student Meredith Kercher in Florence, Italy, on Thursday, January 30, 2014. The appeals court upheld the convictions of Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the 2007 murder of her British roommate. Knox was sentenced to 28½ years in prison, raising the specter of a long legal battle over her extradition. Sollecito's sentence was 25 years.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Sollecito, left, and his father, Francesco, leave after attending the final hearing before the verdict on January 30. After nearly 12 hours of deliberation, the court reinstated the guilty verdict first handed down against Knox and Sollecito in 2009.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese bartender Knox originally accused of Kercher's murder, talks to the press outside the courthouse during a break form the appeal trial of Knox and Sollecito on September 30.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Knox and her former boyfriend Sollecito were convicted in 2009 to 25 years in prison (Sollecito got 26 years). The conviction was overturned in 2011 for "lack of evidence." But Italy's Supreme Court decided last year to retry the case, saying the jury that acquitted them didn't consider all the evidence and that discrepancies in testimony needed to be answered.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student, was found dead with her throat slit in an apartment she shared with Knox in Perugia, Italy, on November 2, 2007.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

When Knox was detained for questioning in 2007, she implicated Lumumba, the owner of a bar where Knox worked. Lumumba was taken into custody and released after two weeks in prison when his alibi was corroborated. He later won a libel suit against Knox.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Sollecito, Knox's boyfriend at the time of the murder, was convicted in December 2009 with Knox and released when their cases were overturned. Prosecutors testified that police scientists found Sollecito's genetic material on a bra clasp of Kercher's found in her room, while his defense claimed there wasn't enough DNA for a positive ID.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast native raised in Perugia, was convicted separately from Knox and Sollecito and is now serving 16 years. Guede admitted to being with Kercher on the night she died, but said he didn't kill her. Both Knox and Sollecito argued that he was the killer, and Guede suggested the couple took Kercher's life.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Meredith Kercher's family lawyer Francesco Maresca, left, argued in court in 2011 that the multiple stab wounds implied more than one aggressor killed Kercher. Pictured from left are Maresca, Kercher's father John, sister Stephanie, brother Lyle and brother John at a press conference in 2008.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Carlo Dalla Vedova, one lawyer on Knox's defense team, argued in court that "the only possible decision to take is that of absolving Amanda Knox" in his closing argument for her appeal hearing.

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Carlo Pacelli represented Patrick Lumumba in his civil suit case. He called Knox two-faced and a "she-devil."

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The Knox-Sollecito retrial14 photos

Giulia Bongiorno, the lead lawyer on Raffaele Sollecito's defense team, compared Knox to Jessica Rabbit on the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Knox is not bad, just "drawn that way," Bongiorno said in her closing statements in the 2011 trial.

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Story highlights

Amanda Knox tells ABC that she wants to one day visit the gravesite of Meredith Kercher

Knox and boyfriend acquitted in Kercher's murder, but appeals court wants her retried

The night of Kercher's murder, Knox smoked pot, but it didn't cloud her memory, she says

Interview comes on heels of memoir, for which Knox was reportedly paid $3.8 million

Amanda Knox describes her strange actions after her roommate's murder as the behavior of a "tone-deaf girl in a trauma" during a wide-ranging and at times tearful interview that aired Tuesday.

Knox, whose memoir, "Waiting to be Heard," has been equally panned and applauded, said she also hopes to earn Meredith Kercher's parents' forgiveness and, one day, permission to visit her study-abroad roommate's gravesite.

"My need for justice for myself is not in contradiction with theirs," she said during the ABC interview. "[I hope] that eventually I can have their permission to pay respects."

Knox and boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted in the 2007 rape and slashing death of 21-year-old Kercher at Knox and Kercher's apartment in Perugia, Italy. A jury overturned the conviction in 2011, and Knox flew home to Seattle.

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Kercher's parents have repeatedly said they simply want the truth surrounding their daughter's death. They said after Knox's exoneration that they were not yet ready to reach out to the now-25-year-old, who says she'd like to be re-evaluated as someone other than "Foxy Knoxy."

Knox opens her memoir with her reaction to the Italian court's verdict and sentencing during the 2009 trial.

"Over all the noise and confusion, I could hear my sister and mother sobbing. My legs couldn't support me. The guards held me up by my armpits and carried me, crumpled, out of the courtroom. In the chaos of my shattered world, I never heard the judge sentence me: 'Twenty-six years.' Done. It was done," she wrote.

Knox explains how she was drawn to Sollecito because he reminded her of Harry Potter and how they stayed in smoking marijuana, having sex and watching "Amelie" the night Kercher was killed.

"We smoked. We had sex. We were together. We just hung out together. We made faces at each other. We were being silly and together," Knox recalled. "I had smoked a joint with Raffaele, and what that did to my memories was it made them less concrete, but it didn't black them out and it didn't change them."

When she got up the next morning, she went home to bathe because Sollecito had a "crummy shower." When she got home, she ignored the open front door because the latch was sometimes broken. The "speckles of blood" in the sink? She just figured they were something Kercher had failed to clean up, or perhaps it was from her own newly pierced ears, she said.

"I had never before experienced anything in my life that was drastic. I didn't think, 'Oh my God, someone's been in here and murdered someone,' " she said.

After Kercher's murder, Knox was filmed smooching on Sollecito outside the murder scene. At the police station, Knox reportedly sat on Sollecito's lap, making faces. She told Kercher's friends she must have suffered.

"How could she not? She got her f***ing throat slit," she reportedly said.

Knox told Sawyer that, at the time, she was thinking that under different circumstances it could have been her dead in the house. She felt lost, alone, vulnerable, she said.

"I wish I would've been more mature about it. ... I think everyone's reaction to something horrible is different," she said. "My friend had been murdered, and it could have just as easily been me. Somehow she died in the house where we were living, and it could've been me."

Reminded of some of the monikers applied to her by the ever-colorful Italian tabloids -- "she-devil with an angel face," "heartless manipulator," "sphinx of Perugia" -- she teared up.

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Knox's book, for which she was reportedly given a $3.8 million advance, has drawn quite opposite reactions from readers. Reviews have ranged from complimentary, noting that the tales of police corruption and lesbian prison guards harassing her will make it a big seller, to indifference.

On Amazon, its dozens of reviewers were diametrically split, with only two reviewers as of Wednesday afternoon giving the book a rating other than one or five stars.

Barbie Latza Nadeau, Rome bureau chief for Newsweek and author of "Angel Face: Sex, Murder, and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox," told CNN that Knox's book demonstrates she has a "selective memory."

"She really glossed over the night of the murder," Nadeau said, explaining she read the book hoping to hear why Knox's and Sollecito's alibis were so incongruous and fluid.

Knox told Sawyer she's much different from the girl who in 2009, as she explains in her memoir, "walked into the ancient Perugian courtroom, where centuries of verdicts had been handed down, praying that a tradition of justice would protect me now."

"I'm not quite as chirpy anymore," she said.

After viewing a video her sister made before she left for Perugia, in which a fresh-faced Knox says with a playful grin how attractive she finds guys, Sawyer asked what she would tell the youngster on the tape.

"I want to tell her not to be afraid of what's going to happen because what happened to me hit me like a train, and there was nothing I could do to stop it."